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Tagged: raspberry pi

Halloween isn’t over yet, there is still time to make something cool for Halloween. Here’s a few to inspire you.

First up is Halloween Prank. While not a completed project, this is a good base for Arduino powered scare tactics! The build uses an Arduino, an Ultrasonic distance sensor, and a servo. By detecting ‘someone coming to your door’ possibly, the servo is triggered. In Jacob’s build the plan is to drop a bunch of spiders on people walking up. That sounds like fun. You could also make it actuate something to jump out at your unsuspecting victims.

Found this one while looking around for more Halloween inspired hacks. Hari picked up a bunch of rubber rats at the dollar store and decided to make a Halloween project out of it.

A Raspberry Pi connected to a Pi Cobbler breakout board, and a 16 channel i2c PWM servo controller puppet an array of rubber rats. Everything is powered by a pair of hobby LiPo batteries and 5v regulators. The rats eyes were swapped out for some bright red LED’s giving a pretty authentic haunted house look.

There’s still time to put something like this together before Halloween!

If you’ve ever been to the Haunted Mansion at one of the Disney Parks, you remember lots of small spooky stuff going on. One of the things they like to do in the Haunted Mansion is have these portraits that slowly change from regular people into ghouls and ghasts. Brandon decided to craft one up himself.

Powering the portrait is a Raspberry Pi, with a 19″ LCD. The whole thing is wrapped in a decorative IKEA frame, painted with a little patina to look antique. On the face Brandon is using Gila Platinum Window film which makes the glass into a 2 way mirror. Software wise it’s using a Raspberry Pi Video Looper. And here is a link to the video loop of Master Gracy on YouTube, but you could probably make your own if you wanted to.

SPiBot is a remote control platform with tank-like tracks. It’s a work in progress, but will be fitted with a rotatable camera, microphone, and distance sensors. It is to be controlled via the web on either a phone, tablet, or laptop.

The base for the platform is a Raspberry Pi. WiFi is used for communication. The HTML interface is served up using nginx and PHP. Motor control happens via PWM from the Pi to motor drivers. Video and pictures will be done with some combination of raspivid, vlc, ffmpeg, and raspivid.

It looks like the project is pretty far a long, but not quite finished. Hopefully the author has some pets he can terrorize when it’s finished.

Who doesn’t love Halloween? Especially since most of us are on the other end now doing the scaring instead of being a scared kid snatching up candy. Cabe wanted to create some pro haunted effects for himself and came up with a pretty cool project.

The build uses a 24″ LCD screen that is supposed to look like a window. Behind the door are a bunch of solenoid’s controlling pneumatic piston’s that really bring the video to life, making you think something is on the other side trying to get out. Everything is controlled by a Raspberry Pi, and it is triggered by a photoelectric beam sensor. The code is written in good ol’ regular c and the video is played through OMXPlayer.

Check out the video demo after the break. Source code, schematics, BOM and other details can be found on element14.

Universal remote controls are a natural want. I know I hate having 100 remotes for everything remote control. So what do you do when you start getting used to using your phone as a remote (via web interfaces) ? Well start converting your other stuff to be controlled via the web too!

Dalgibbard has an entertainment center using XBMC and a Raspberry Pi. But the HDMI switcher uses an infra-red remote control. So naturally Dalgibbard hacked the switcher to be controlled by a web interface on the Raspberry Pi.

The HDMI switcher is wired up to the Raspberry Pi via a relay and a few discrete components to the GPIO pins. The pins are controlled by a python script that is executed by a web page using PHP and Apache. Simple and efficient.

Need to stick that Raspberry Pi in a tight spot ? Or is it just a little to big for your enclosure ? Finn has some ideas how to shed some size off of the Pi for a slimmer fit.

The first mod is the obvious one, de-solder the RCA video connector (if you aren’t using it). Next remove the audio jack. Those will slim it down a little bit in the width. Now for trimming the length, the biggest problem is the pertruding full sized SD card.

There is a fix for that, you can get a micro-sd adapter that will fit nicer. Or you can do it the hackalizer way and take some scissors to that SD card. As it turns out most modern SD cards only use the very tip, the rest is just empty plastic. Who knew ?